NEWBERG, Ore. — Lynn Lamping spreads a spiral-bound, color-coded chart that from a distance could be confused for the periodic table across the table and points to a single word: “at.”
“You start there because it unlocks the majority of our words,” she said.
The chart breaks the English language into six categories, or “syllable types,” each color-coded and each governed by a rule — why “got” and “go” sound different, why “gave” needs a silent “e,” why a vowel followed by the letter R stops behaving like a vowel at all…